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When a Drug Battle Spells Extinction

B. Heger/United Nations High Commissioner for RefugeesA traditional gathering of the Tule people of Colombia. Men and women sit on different sides.

The drug trade and other domestic strife are wreaking havoc on Colombia’s dwindling population of indigenous peoples while also threatening the integrity of the country’s biologically diverse forests, the United Nations High Council on Refugees reported this week.

More than 40 percent of the country’s 84 distinct indigenous groups are now at risk of extinction, the United Nations said, because of the pressures of the country’s long-running internal armed conflict, which is fueled partly by the cocaine trade.

With only 1,200 remaining members, the Tule tribe of northwestern Colombia is considered uniquely threatened. In recent months, armed groups have overrun traditional Tule lands, killing and terrorizing villagers and forcibly recruiting young people into their ranks.

Tule leaders fear that if they are driven off their lands, the forest that they have inhabited for generations will be ruined by development. “The Tule are an ancient people and their value is that they protect the environment,” one community’s chief and spiritual leader told United Nations representatives during a recent visit.

Meanwhile, the Colombian government’s coca eradication measures continue to draw criticism from some quarters for collateral damage to the environment and indigenous and rural people.

In August, the Guardian newspaper in London published an open letter by nearly 50 academics, many of them from Colombian universities, to the newly elected president, Juan Manuel Santos, protesting the fumigation of coca crops. In the letter, the professors claim “confirmed knowledge” that Colombia’s antinarcotics police established a base earlier this year in the Cauca region along the Pacific coastline that they are using to lead fumigation operations.

“The impact of the widespread spraying on the local communities has been devastating,” the letter states. “The planes have targeted not just illegal coca plants, but all vegetation, including staple crops that local populations depend upon.”

The Cuaca region is one of several areas identified as a hot spot of biological diversity by a World Bank-financed study in the 1990s, the Proyecto Biopacifico.

“It is in utter disregard of the recommendations drawn up by this acclaimed study that the Colombian government has undertaken a massive, indiscriminate fumigation campaign in the region, hoping to eradicate illegal coca cultivation,” the professors wrote.

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